As someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.
My opinion on this: the "education" establishment in the US is driven by people looking for consulting fees, as shown by someone in this post linking to Dr Boaler's absurd consulting fees.
Math standards are being dropped in the US, and the fight is coming from your colleagues. Reading is taught incorrectly and has been for decades as shown by dropping phonics based education and using "whole word association". Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead of American education, and the professors and educators are debating on if they should make American students unable to take Algebra in middle school, despite numerous countries learning algebra years before that.
My Chinese gf learned how to analyze simple electric circuits (Ohm's law, reading schematics, etc.) in middle school and was tested on it for high school entrance, even though she was an arts/humanities student. The standards here in NC for middle school science seem to only require knowing that circuits must be closed and insulators/conductors. That would be an (elective) HS or AP physics class. Also, there seems to be one set of standards and one test for all students in middle school and pre-university students. Instead of "detracking" by going down to the lowest common denominator, there are high expectations for all students.
In the UK and many other countries, what we call "advanced" AP Calculus BC is just "A-Level Math" and is the expected minimum for studying STEM fields in university. In America you can get into university (even a prestigious one) and start off at "College Algebra." People from other countries are shocked that law, medicine, etc. are graduate degrees requiring a different-field undergrad, because of how little a high school diploma actually means in America.
There is a massive state of under-education in America, and shockingly, it's become more and more popular to call education and degrees worthless. There's a lot to criticize about the out-of-pocket costs of college, but the education itself is invaluable. And weakening high school degrees even further is the last thing we need.
It may be possible to get into any given University and start off with college algebra, although I'm not entirely sure about that. However is certainly not the case that you can get into any program at any University and start off at college algebra.
Admission requirements for majors are determined by departments responsible for those majors, and they can and do set their own standards for what is acceptable when declaring that major.
For example anything remotely related to Stem at any of the UC schools is going to expect that you have, prior to entering the program, already completed at least the equivalent of Calculus BC, and usually linear algebra as well, in order to be accepted into the program. If you're starting off at college algebra in one of those schools you will never complete the math sequence necessary to start one of these programs and still graduate within 4 years.
Not much writing either, because so much is online.
My wife is homeschooling next year.
They do a fair bit of writing, but not as rigorous as what I had in 5th grade. We had to write legit 5-paragraph essays and reports (I remember this because I struggled with it), and my son’s longest compositions were only required to be 1- or 2-paragraph blurbs in a composition book.
It seems like they took the bottom 40% of learners as the baseline for their implementation of Common Core. If anything they should have at least taken the middle 40%, since that brackets the mean in a normal distribution.
But what do I know. I just have a PhD in physics and have forgotten more math and statistics than they ever learned, and don’t make use of those ridiculous algorithmic tricks they teach and force kids to use, instead of fundamentals.
One of the reasons for this is that schools typically pay teachers more if they have a masters or doctoral degree in education (but it doesn't matter what type of doctoral degree...so people flock to the less rigorous one).
I think one of the problems is that a proper experiment takes ~ 12 years (or more, if your want, eg, impact in college or on writing life) which leads to many problems:
- how do you get the research funded?
- how do you get people to stick to your approach for that long?
- how do you justify the risk that your idea will not make things worse (for a whole 12 years...)?
If you could get say 50 countries to do a double blind experiment with two different teaching methods, you might make use of the scale. But even then you can only conclude something if all results have (more or less) the same effect size, and what do you win? Little. You can't even generalize over countries, since it wasn't a representative sample. And that's ignoring all the aforementioned factors, and the near certainty of a less than flawless execution that will definitely screw up the results.
So I don't think "200 countries" will work. Such approaches have been tried with other, easier manipulations, like dieting, and it frequently turns out that interpreting the data isn't straight-forward. It isn't physics.
If you want a physics metaphor: it's like dark matter: no idea what it is, where to begin, contradicting theories all around. But this is right under your nose. You've taken part in it, and if you work at uni, you still do.